Pathways and transformations of energy and matter (PTEM) are a conceptually challenging but essential component of biological literacy. Curricular gaps about PTEM nevertheless remain; although lessons targeting PTEM at small scales (chemical, molecular, cellular) and large scales (ecological, global) are most common, they do not necessarily address understanding of the intervening organismal scale. Moreover, at the organismal scale, student reasoning about PTEM in one taxonomic category (e.g., a…